Being a job-ready engineering graduate means that you’ve got what it takes to be a valued employee in the first job you land – with professional knowledge, practical skills and the soft skills that set you apart.
When you think about what it takes to be an engineer, you probably think about STEM areas – physics, maths and chemistry, and maybe design skills. But what do you know about soft skills, and other ‘job-ready’ attributes?
How to become job-ready
When we say you get ‘job-ready’ engineering skills at Curtin, we mean that we give you the opportunities to develop the areas of expertise you need for your career in engineering:
- knowledge of your field – the theories, concepts and how they’re applied
- practical skills for the activities of your field
- soft skills that ensure you can be a valued contributor to multidisciplinary work teams.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are often thought of as people skills – how you engage with others and build professional relationships. They include the ability to communicate clearly, participate in teamwork, manage time. You might’ve assumed that soft skills are what managers need – the knack of being able to ‘talk-the-talk’. But soft skills are relevant to all roles and all industries, which is why they’re also known as ‘transferrable’ skills.
Cognitive abilities like reasoning, problem-solving and emotional intelligence are also considered to be soft skills. ‘Empathy’ is another desirable personal quality, because the ability to empathise with people and communities that have certain challenges is fundamental in many careers, from medicine to journalism to engineering.
What soft skills do engineers need?
Collaboration and communication skills are key skills for anyone who works as part of a project team. Keep in mind that engineers with the same qualification as you will generally have the same knowledge and skillsets as you, so it’s competence in soft skills that could set you apart from other job applicants. And once you’ve started your engineering career, any soft skills you demonstrate will give your employers more reason to trust your capabilities – which in turn will help you advance your career.
Being able to analyse information, engage with stakeholders and communicate clearly is important. But at Curtin, as well as giving our Engineering students opportunities to gain those traditional soft skills, we understand that, like practical skills, non-technical knowledge evolves and changes with society’s needs.
Here are the other ‘job-ready’ skills we think are important for the next generation of engineers.
Environmental awareness
Like most university students in the 2020s, engineering students are aware that environmental issues are impacting all areas of society. At Curtin, our curriculum aligns with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and emphasises your responsibilities as an engineer, including how to address climate change challenges and advocate for greater social and cultural diversity in industry.
Systems thinking
Systems thinking is being highlighted as the most important cognitive skill of the 21st century. And what is it? It’s the big picture. You’re applying ‘systems thinking’ when you think about all the parts that make up a whole structure. It helps you understand the complexity of a thing and the relationships between its components – whether it’s a bike, a bridge or the human body.
As an engineer, systems thinking will help you to design more efficient, robust and adaptable engineering systems.
At Curtin, all of our Engineering courses encourage systems thinking, from our Engineering Foundation Year, where Curtin students learn the fundamental concepts and skills common to all areas of engineering before choosing the Engineering major that suits them best, to our specialist postgraduate degrees.
Systems thinking is fundamental to deep understanding and to innovation. Which brings us to the engineers’ soft skill #3 …
An innovation mindset
For next-generation engineers, a considerable proportion will be in jobs that are involved in energy transition in one way or another – particularly electrical, chemical, civil, mechanical and mining engineers.
To bring those fields together in a collective effort, in 2023 Curtin engineering researchers and lecturers collaborated to design an innovative course in energy engineering. Energy engineering is a massive growth field – and the demand for energy engineers who can invent, develop, implement and manage energy systems that are reliable, efficient and environmentally friendly is set to grow.
Curtin’s Bachelor of Energy Engineering (Honours) course aligns with our research endeavours in energy transition. For example, we’ve established the Curtin Institute for Energy Transition, or CIET, as a multidisciplinary research hub. The centre brings together engineering, science, engineering, health and humanities fields to encourage the multidisciplinary research effort involved in energy transition.
As a Curtin Energy Engineering student, you’ll be part of the world-renowned Western Australian School of Mines, or WASM. And WASM hosts several research groups with energy resources projects, including lithium extraction and hydrogen storage technologies. Being in the global hub of energy and resources activities that is Western Australia gives Curtin’s Engineering graduates more opportunities to be at the fore of endeavours in mining and energy innovation – an area where soft skills in collaboration and systems thinking will be invaluable.
We also recognise that to foster innovation you need to demonstrate it. At Curtin, in addition to our purpose-designed Engineering Pavilion, we have a unique facility known as the Green Electric Energy Park. The GEEP, as we call it, is an innovative lab supporting advanced power-system concepts for renewable energy technologies. (In fact, after Curtin established GEEP, it was applauded by the international Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power and Energy Society as a new initiative in power engineering education.) At the GEEP, Curtin Engineering students conduct experiments and contribute to research projects on renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro; distributed generation using hydrogen fuel cells; battery energy storage-based micro-grids; hybrid power systems; power converters; and energy storages.
Innovation and AI
It’s hard to imagine 21st-century innovation without AI. It’s a realm where systems thinking is vital to defining AI tasks, and where ‘prompt engineering’ – creating instructions for AI – is a key communication skill.
Not surprisingly, our Mechatronics Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering have a strong focus on advanced automation and robotics. However, Curtin’s AI-based innovation is happening even where you can’t see it – like, underwater. A Curtin team is developing a new AI-based technology to help monitor and repair corrosion in such as jetties, ports, pipelines and other marine structures.
So, in addition to the better-known soft skills – communication, engagement, leadership – at Curtin, we encourage our Engineering graduates to gain the lesser-known soft skills that we think will define 21st-century engineering.
Collaborating on projects related to global and community need, being immersed in the realm of innovation, developing or exploiting new technologies … contributing to solutions for the big problems. Those are the job qualities that, beyond the salary, make a career rewarding, fascinating and fun! Not only do they highlight the depth and breadth of job-ready skills for engineers, but they also demonstrate how exciting the careers will be for Curtin Engineering graduates.
Learn more about Curtin’s Engineering degrees.
